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Amazon's internal policies towards open source and side projects are incredibly restrictive (in my opinion). If Amazon doesn't really want its employees to enga

Amazon's internal policies towards open source and side projects are incredibly restrictive (in my opinion). If Amazon doesn't really want its employees to engage with open source, how genuine are the motives here?

_msw_ 8y ago
Disclosure: I work at Amazon, and from time to time I help out with open source policy. There have been a number of changes to Amazon's policies over the years, and personal participation ("outside activity") is really straightforward now. For the vast majority of cases you just need to submit a ticket with details, and then it is auto-approved. For comparison, you can have a look at Google's open source policy on personal projects here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ If you are an employee and have questions, drop me a line at msw at amazon.com
- eclipxe 8y ago
  +1 Amazon's policy on outside activity is very reasonable.
  - User23 8y ago
    The State of California’s Public Policy on outside activity is very reasonable. Amazon is just making a virtue out of necessity.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    Unless you want to make a game...
- snaky 8y ago
  > and then it is auto-approved So the prospects of Amazon reimplement all the popular open-source software someday is viable?
jchw 8y ago
Frankly it's irrelevant. Nobody ever said you have to contribute back to open source to benefit from it, though I think you'd be stupid not to. Amazon released their fork instead of keeping it in house, could be a PR move, but I believe they just want to keep the advantages Elastic had being open source. But honestly, whether the companies are 'right' or not isn't my point, and I hope it's not what people take away from my ranting. I only wanted to make a point about the narratives around FOSS being destroyed. People chose to build businesses on open source; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. That's all we're learning. Contrary to reports of its death, open source is alive and well.

_msw_ 8y ago

Disclosure: I work at Amazon, and from time to time I help out with open source policy. There have been a number of changes to Amazon's policies over the years, and personal participation ("outside activity") is really straightforward now. For the vast majority of cases you just need to submit a ticket with details, and then it is auto-approved. For comparison, you can have a look at Google's open source policy on personal projects here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ If you are an employee and have questions, drop me a line at msw at amazon.com

eclipxe 8y ago
+1 Amazon's policy on outside activity is very reasonable.
- User23 8y ago
  The State of California’s Public Policy on outside activity is very reasonable. Amazon is just making a virtue out of necessity.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Unless you want to make a game...
snaky 8y ago
> and then it is auto-approved So the prospects of Amazon reimplement all the popular open-source software someday is viable?

jchw 8y ago

Frankly it's irrelevant. Nobody ever said you have to contribute back to open source to benefit from it, though I think you'd be stupid not to. Amazon released their fork instead of keeping it in house, could be a PR move, but I believe they just want to keep the advantages Elastic had being open source. But honestly, whether the companies are 'right' or not isn't my point, and I hope it's not what people take away from my ranting. I only wanted to make a point about the narratives around FOSS being destroyed. People chose to build businesses on open source; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. That's all we're learning. Contrary to reports of its death, open source is alive and well.